Aegina, 30 April

On Wednesday, our “Theater & the Arts of Healing” class enjoyed the company of Melanie Harmon, Director of Communications at AHA International in Portland, visiting to experience the Athens program first hand for future recruitment. A Master of Arts in theater who ran a theater company in Colorado before her career turn towards AHA, Melanie was a welcome participant in our reading and discussion of Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Yesterday she joined the full group of students, with Michael Wedde and Nina Lorum from the Athens Centre, on our day-trip to the island of Aegina—the maritime rival of Athens in Aeschylus’ day, now a ninety minute ferry ride from Piraeus. Michael’s predecessor, the late Ann Blasingham, lived on Aegina and, when Nancy and I were here for the Fall 2001 session, used to commute to the Athens Centre to teach “Monuments of Greece.” Now buried on the island, she was in our thoughts.

The “Phaedra” (a name packed with mythic associations) carried us to Aegina town escorted by a wheeling convoy of gulls. We disembarked mid-morning on a clear, sunny day. The winds were vigorous, the waters ink-blue at depth and turquoise near shore, and a regatta of ten or twelve identical twin-sailed boats, white canvas bright against the sea, pulled past the promontory towards which we made our way outside town: the ruins of Kolona. The settlement here dates from the Bronze Age, with traces of Minoan influence (an “X” mason’s mark on a large stone in an outer wall; pottery shards, etc.). The most striking feature of Kolona (from the Italian, colonna) gave the place its current name: the sole surviving column from the 5th century B.C.E. Temple of Apollo. Hewn from a single stone, not erected by the stacking of barrels, it still stands, greatly weathered, narrowed to a sharp asymmetric tip. Multiple layers of habitation, the effects of various invasions, and successive construction projects are evident here, cogently explained by Michael. One of the great pleasures of the site is its immediacy. Unlike the more trafficked ruins of the Acropolis or Delphi, roped off and prowled by guards with hair-trigger whistles, Kolona—Nina having paid our entry fees—stood quiet and available to us. One could lean against Apollo’s column or touch a surviving patch of water-tight plaster in the Byzantine cistern. The place was open to us as the Acropolis had been to Mark Twain or Lord Byron in the nineteenth century, whose accounts we read and discussed in the “Greek Journeys” class. Thus Kolona adds another welcome layer of time-travel to its ruins.

The crown jewel of Aegina is the Temple of Athena-Aphaia, located several miles up a winding road we climbed by bus. This mountaintop is the ideal place to explain Aegina’s rivalry with Athens, directly visible across the Saronic gulf: amidst the great white reticulated expanse of concrete, one can make out Lycabettus Hill and the Acropolis. If Pericles dubbed Aegina “the eyesore of Piraeus,” as Michael noted, the Aeginians had an equal and opposite answer. The metopes of the Temple of Athena-Aphaia have long since vanished, but the sanctuary itself, while much smaller than the Parthenon, is more complete, with a large number of original columns and entablatures still standing.

On the way back to Aegina town, we stopped at the workshop of Mr. Nektarios, the island’s primary surviving potter, a man in his late fifties who smokes cigarettes and scorns apprentices. An ancient tradition is withering but, at present, in sure hands. He welcomed us into his cramped space lined with unfired jugs, pitchers, and pots of many sorts. Then he proceeded to turn a few on his wheel, commenting in an amiable gruff voice while Nina translated. Huddled in a semi-circle, we watched him work the clay: after kneading it, he placed a moist lump on the plate and, the wheel turning, palmed the pile into a column, then thrust thumbs in from above to hollow out the interior. Swiftly, an attractive shape emerged, wobbling into sudden symmetry, touched up with a blunt straight-edge. With one hand inside, he thinned the walls into shape and, with a small blade of wood, inscribed a tight, then widening spiral down along the form. The objects took shape quickly and without false moves. After four throws, he took us outside, down through dried grasses, thistles, and scattered red poppies to his kilns: a traditional wood-fired oven and, inside a shed nearby, a modern green metal kiln still cooling from last night’s firing. One jarring element on the grounds here: from a pole on the roof of a nearby home dangled the body of a crow, a striking species with gray body and black head & wings that Nancy and I have admired since first seeing them on Crete. It was a stark advisory to all such birds to stay clear.

We stepped over to Mr. Nektarios’ crowded little display room bright with glazed items and his fenced yard jumbled with others largely unglazed, and several students made purchases. Then we all enjoyed a few hours of free time back in Aegina town. We embarked for Athens on the 6:00 ferry, the “Agios Nektarios,” a vessel owned by the island. The “Nektarios” coincidence is but briefly surprising: the name is widely shared. One of the island’s major luminaries was Saint Nektarios (1846-1920), who founded a monastery on Aegina in 1904 and, like Ann, rests there.